Page 36 of A Thousand Painted Hours

I wondered if I could find coconut, save enough sugar and flour for a small cake. Nina would give me the eggs. “My favorite was kaju balls.”

“I remember.” Her hands had gone idle.

“Can you manage a few more bites, Mother? You’ve barely eaten enough for a flea these past few weeks.”

She looked at me. “I’m dying, sweet girl.”

“What? No! You’re just weak with all the interrupted nights.”

Her smile was kind, and she held out a hand for mine, which I gave. “The interruptions are hastening the end, but we both know this has been coming for quite some time. My liver is failing, darling.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. “I don’t want you to die.”

“I know. But it comes to us all.”

“Not yet, though.” I shook my head. “I’ll find some things to tempt your appetite, and perhaps we should move the bed to the sitting room so the travel time to the cellar isn’t so long.”

She gazed at me for a long moment. “All right.”

I bent over and kissed her forehead. “Not yet,” I said, and pulled back to look into her blue eyes. “Please.”

Lifting my hand to kiss my knuckles, she nodded. “Why don’t you paint, my dear? I think it would be good for you.”

“Yes, all right.” I pointed to the tray. “Will you have a few more bites?”

“I’ll try.”

When she’d managed a bit more lunch, I allowed her to shoo me out, and took the tray downstairs. I saw no sign of Peter in the garden, but he’d eaten, so I washed up the dishes and headed back up the stairs.

The studio held the scent of herbs and smoke from the bombings as well, but the fresh air was good anyway. In the breeze, I wrapped an apron around my body and went to my easel, where I was working from memory on an iteration of an Egyptian woman selling vegetables. Her expression was hostile beneath her dull-blue hijab, one knee tucked under her skirts. The rendition of the vegetables was too acute, I saw now, and began to smooth out details, leaving impressions of bananas and dates, the suggestion of carrots, the harsh sun burning down on her head, on the wall behind her, the cobblestone street.

Peter had been stationed in Cairo on his first diplomatic assignment. We’d only been married a short time, and had not yet become entangled in the betrayals that would unravel whatever fabric we might have woven.

The post delighted me. I loved being back in a world that while not India, struck some of the same places in my soul. We explored the wonders of the ancients, and I painted the Pyramids, those magnificent andmagical monuments. We traveled on the Nile, and tried rather earnestly for a child. I was not in love with Peter, but a child would have given me hope, a sense of purpose. Perhaps it would have healed Peter as well.

The child never arrived, but I found my voice as a painter in the workaday women of the souks and bazaars, in the builders and laundresses, in the bright, hot light and flat colors of midday. Something in my art that had been dulled by the losses of the Great War came alive, and I’d found myself painting with wild intensity. I painted small things, domestic moments, women’s work and women’s hands and women’s point of view.

And I painted faces. Each face I encountered I found myself weighing for whether I was creating a fantasy or giving life to an actual human woman.

They proved to be quite popular works, and I traveled between London and Cairo regularly, showing in a gallery that sold a great deal of my paintings. I found, too, a gallery in Cairo. For the first time, my work was celebrated, and I reveled in it.

My sketchbooks, from those years and all the others, were stacked on shelves I’d had built for that purpose, each labeled with the year. I left the painting and searched out the original sketches, taking down the books from the mid-1920s, all of them thick and bursting, held together with string. I unwrapped one, and leafed through it to find the record of our trip down the Nile, the open desert with the bright blue sky. I’d struggled deeply with finding my voice in art school, and in Cairo, I’d found some magic.

On a lower shelf were the first notebooks I’d kept when I was a girl. I reached for them, looking this time for the endless, endless iterations of tigers we’d drawn that summer, and then to a later set, sketches of the maharaja’s palace, both the dazzlement of the tile work and courtyards and the surprise and sadness of the crumbling rooms where pale-winged griffon vultures nested.

And last, the swimming hole that had become so sacred to us.

A Death in England

August 1911

Nainital, India

—18—

My father arrived unexpectedly from Lucknow late on a Thursday evening. I saw him from my bedroom window, but he asked immediately for my mother. They were cloistered away until supper, which was laid in the courtyard to take advantage of the breezes from the hills. As happened in late August, there was a hint of the coming season beneath the heat of the day, nothing so overt as a chill, but a crispness in the corners, a whisper of cool along the flat tiles. I’d been out sketching with Gurdaya most of the day and arrived at the table famished.

Mother had not yet fully recovered from a recent malarial flare. Her skin held a pale-blue undertone, and at the neckline of her dress, her collarbone stood out too boldly. I kissed her head as I passed. “I’m glad to see you at the table tonight.”